America: sicker and shorter

Another pair of reports highlight the failing state of healthcare in the US.

There have been a pair of interesting reports recently that have examined the health and wellbeing of various industrialized nations across the globe, and they both paint the US in a rather bad light.

The subject of healthcare in the US can be a contentious one, and it's also an area where peoples' perceptions don't always align with the facts on the ground. It's also going to become a hotter topic in the coming months. The release of Sicko, the latest piece of agitprop from filmmaker Michael Moore, and the upcoming US presidential election are both going to raise the issue of healthcare in America.

The first report, from the Commonwealth Fund, contains the results of several years' worth of surveys from patients and primary care physicians from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany between 2004 and 2006. Several different measures of healthcare were assessed: quality of care (including the right care, safe care, coordinated care and patient-centered care), access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. In each of these measures, with the exception of the right care, the US came last out of six.

What makes this result so scandalous is the amount of money the US pours into healthcare each year: $6,000 per-patient per-year costs, a sum more than double any of the other nations. Yet 15 percent of the population have no coverage due to a lack of any form of universal health care. Despite all this money spent, efficiency in the US system is well below that of its peers. Layers of administrative bureaucracy exist that aren't present abroad, per-patient costs are double, as stated above, electronic medical records have had a low rate of adoption, and patients frequently visit emergency rooms for conditions that could have been treated by a regular doctor had one been available.

The effects of failing US healthcare are also showing up in other studies. A report in the journal Social Science Quarterly looks at the relative decline in the height of US citizens in relation to their European counterparts. Prior to World War II, US citizens were some of the tallest people on the planet, but since then their heights have stagnated; Europeans are now on average between 2 and 6 mm taller, despite the US position as the most affluent nation on earth. Like the previous study, this data reflects the growing disparity in prosperity in the United States, where income inequality is higher now than at any time since the Gilded Age. Poor access to preventative healthcare and adequate nutrition during childhood has a significant effect on adult height, and this, coupled with the decline in various other measures of health outcomes, will have social and economic consequences for years to come.